A few years ago Brett Ratner appeared on Entourage, playing a brash, belligerent and presumably heightened version of himself in a decadent scene filmed in his own Beverly Hills home. Load the clip on YouTube and there's a maelstrom of vitriol in the comments below. Suffice to say, the top-rated comment ends with "Hope he gets diarrhea".

Ratner gets a lot of this. With 14 years of feature films under his belt, including the Rush Hour franchise, the Red Dragon remake and the third X-Men movie, he's made $1.7bn for Hollywood, which irks his detractors, particularly X-Men fans disappointed by his end to the original trilogy. Ratner, though, is very comfortable with his success and very proud of his films, and it seems – certainly from the time I spend talking to him – that perceived credibility is not something he yearns for.

He cut his teeth on Def Jam music videos, and was 26 when he directed his first feature, 1997's Charlie Sheen/Chris Tucker action comedy Money Talks, which more than doubled its $20m budget at the box office. His Rush Hour films alone have grossed $850m. Winning the hearts of disgruntled fanboys is not a concern.

When I speak to him Ratner's in his New York office, having spent the previous evening hosting a book signing for Chic's Nile Rodgers, a lifelong friend. After the signing, Ratner brought Rodgers and a host of music types, including Bryan Ferry, back to his house for a party. Ratner, now 42, is almost as famous for his parties as he is for his career, another thing that seems to rankle his critics, but he insists he only ever wanted to be a film-maker; the money and women merely accompanied the success. His new film, Tower Heist, has been a Ratner project since 2006. Ben Stiller, Casey Affleck, Matthew Broderick and Gabourey Sidibe make up a gang of misfits who team up with thief Eddie Murphy to rob their fraudulent billionaire boss (Alan Alda), and it's smart, witty and a lot of fun.

Brett Ratner. Photo: Joe Corrigan/Getty

Ratner is especially proud of the film's character development and the cast's chemistry, although his biggest coup might be coaxing the best performance out of Eddie Murphy in aeons. "I think he was waiting for the right director," he says, "because doing that in the wrong hands might not work and could hurt everything. I feel like he felt really comfortable working with me." Ratner had wanted to work with Murphy for years. "If it wasn't for Eddie, Rush Hour wouldn't exist, for sure. I grew up watching 48 Hours and Beverly Hills Cop. He invented the genre."

Ratner's own films are not ground-breaking, nor does he claim they are. Rush Hour traded off a tried, tested and well-worn buddy-movie formula; Ratner was a fan of both Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan, and his idea to juxtapose the two, bringing together both black audiences and martial arts fans, was as effective as it was simple. The secret to his success lies in the fact that choices like this are unabashedly enthusiastic, as opposed to cynical and studio-driven. He knows the multiplex audience, because he is the multiplex audience. He was brought in late in the day to direct X-Men: The Last Stand – so late that Matthew Vaughn had already stepped down citing too little time to do it justice – because the studio knew he could handle the set-pieces and could do the job, reliably, without risking anything leftfield or unpredictable.

And while he may not have had respect from his peers at film school, he has it from many of his peers today. In 2003, Robert Evans – the man Ratner describes as his "best friend" – wrote in Vanity Fair that Ratner "can maestro most anything he wishes". He became close with Roman Polanski after the latter loved Rush Hour and wanted to meet him, he says, and the same happened with Quentin Tarantino after Money Talks.

Though not everyone is as enthusiastic. As he was gearing up to makerecent X-Men prequel First Class, Matthew Vaughn was quoted as saying he "could have made something a hundred times better" than what Ratner did with X-Men 3, "with far more emotion and heart," then later described it as "wall to wall noise and drama". In response, when First Class was released this summer, Ratner tweeted all the X-Men films' opening weekend box office figures, with his own on top and Vaughn's at the bottom. "That was my silent jab," says Ratner. "I would never knock another director. I don't know if he actually said that or not but that's what was written, something like, 'If I would have directed X-Men it would have made much more money.' And then he did an X-Men and it didn't, so I had to respond!"

Film websites were quick to chastise Ratner, pointing out that box office success does not necessarily equate to quality film-making. "I wasn't doing it to create a stir but I don't really care what people think," he says. "People can criticise all day long, I think I've proven myself, I think I deliver. And I agree, box office does not mean a movie's good, but I feel like I'm making good movies and I'm delivering in box office." The day after Ratner's tweets (there was a succession of them, all listing his box office successes), Vaughn phoned him to apologise, he says, claiming hiswords had been taken out of context. "I believe that, because a lot of things I've said have been taken out of context," say Ratner. "We're friends now."

Tower Heist is Ratner's first film in four years, but he's been busy. He has a book publishing company, production credits on Catfish, Skyline, Horrible Bosses and Tarsem Singh's upcoming Snow White film, and has a branding company that has produced ads for the likes of Guitar Hero (Activision's CEO said he hired Ratner because he "genetically" understands how to make money). He's exec producer on a Woody Allen documentary he says is "the most incredible thing you'll ever see," and is next directing 39 Clues for Spielberg, based on a popular series of teen adventure books. He's also set to do more work with Eddie Murphy; Tower Heist was Murphy's idea, and the pair have been working on ideas for a new Beverly Hills Cop film, although Ratner seems less certain about it now, more inclined to do something entirely new with him. Somewhat bizarrely, he's also producing a feature version of Hong Kong Phooey, with Murphy voicing the lead ("I pitched it to Eddie and he said, 'Hong Kong Phooey, I like that shit.'" I made him an offer the next day"). And he's co-producing next year's Oscar ceremony, with Murphy hosting.

Ratner's own films, though, aren't exactly Oscar bait. I ask him why, if, as he says, his favourite film-makers are Polanski and Hal Ashby, his films are in a completely different orbit to theirs.

"Because I'm not pretending to be somebody else," he says. "Do I have a small movie in me? Yeah, probably, when I'm 60. But I'm not Hal Ashby, I'm not Roman Polanski. I'm true to myself. Whether you like it or not."